In March, the Discovery Institute – a conservative Christian educational foundation – issued a statement countering assertions by intelligent design opponents that the goals of ID proponents were to supplant science with religion and turn the nation into a theocracy.
"Discovery Institute's Centre for Science and Culture does not support theocracy. We should not have to say this, but apparently we do," the Institute stated. "Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture rejects all attempts to impose orthodoxies on the practice of science as contrary to the spirit of the scientific enterprise."
One of the Discovery Institute's goals in supporting intelligent design is combating what it calls the "unscientific philosophy of materialism," by challenging neo-Darwinism and "cosmologies" that see the universe as self-existent and self-organising.
"It is in the context of our concern about the world-view implications of certain scientific theories that our wedge strategy must be understood. Far from attacking science (as has been claimed), we are instead challenging scientific materialism – the simplistic philosophy or world-view that claims that all of reality can be reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone. We believe that this is a defense of sound science."
The case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District is expected to run for another three weeks.
[Editor's Note: Francis Helguero contributed reporting from Washington, D.C, for this article.]
Joe Alvarez
and Francis Helguero
Christian Today Correspondents
